PRAXIS – Special edition 1

PHOTOGRAPHS

Antoine d’Agata

TEXT

Yannick HAENEL

In Mexico, women are first and foremost subjected to the systemic violence that destroys structures, bodies, and human relationships. They carry the immense weight of a fate that does not need to be and for which the global economic system is primarily responsible.

For 40 years – long before I became a photographer – I have lived, in Mexico as elsewhere, through my own experience and in accordance with this need for a commonality among the community of those who have no community, or as George Bataille evokes in the broad sense, the “community of lovers”, the community of the ardent and wrecked, of the invisible and infinitely fragmented, of those who have nothing but their bodies to survive, to feel, and to exist.

These are the men and women who have conveyed their negative, secret, and forbidden passions, and that have allowed me to live in relationship with the other, in a sexual and narcotic communion that boldly asserts itself in the face of the law, thus allowing me to establish a place of my own.

All these years, I have lived on the fringe, refusing the physical and moral comforts that are the familiar lot of the well-meaning. I shared the reality of these women I photographed because their sordid existence touches upon the sublime, because they carry within them, like a mortal burden, the pain of the world.

At first, they fascinated me, then I desired them, then, finally, I loved them and learned to live with them. Resistance to the violence inflicted upon them is done by sharing their experience. I paid the price of this choice of life with my own flesh. In this place of mine, I am untroubled by criticism or comments.

Antoine d’Agata

PRAXIS | Antoine d’Agata, México 1986 – 2021
hardcover
800 exemplaires
24 x 32 cm
120 pages